Genre: Action
Premise: A guy who builds boat engines for a living is recruited by a boat-racing crew who use the racing as cover for their real jobs – yacht pirates.
About: This is the big script that sold a couple of weeks ago. It came together as a project once Jake Gyllenhaal signed on. As I told you guys in the newsletter, you’re always one cool script idea away from getting a big flashy movie made. Glenn has been out of the game for a while. Look at him now.
Writer: John Glenn
Details: 124 pages
I’m always nervous when I review spec scripts. We don’t have many of these to celebrate. So I know, when they come around, it’s important that they’re good. If they’re good, it increases the chances the movie will be good. And if the movie is good, that means Hollywood will be buying more original material on spec. So I always feel pressure when I’m reviewing these, especially one as high-profile as this. This isn’t a rinky-dink million dollar horror spec. This is going to be a big production. So put your hands together and pray with me!
29 year-old Jessie lives in the middle of nowhere next to some lake. He builds boat engines and then races them. He barely makes any money off of this, though, which has put him in massive debt. Therefore, he isn’t surprised when an older guy named Marty shows up and tells him that he’s bought out his operation.
Marty informs Jessie that if we wants his business back, he has to come build boat engines for him down in Miami, where the real racing happens. Jessie reluctantly heads down to the Gateway to the Americas and meets the crew, which includes the hot-but-damaged Fiona, the slick Cuban, Nestor, the Nav systems expert, Bao, and a few other folks.
Jessie is surprised when Marty allows him to participate in a preliminary race, but Jessie shows that the big time is still above his pay grade, as he finishes last. That’s okay, Marty tells him. Because this racing thing? It’s all for show. What they really do is head out to international waters in these speedboats and rob gigantic billionaire yachts. And they’ve got the biggest one yet on their radar.
Jessie and the team prep extensively for the yacht known as the “Anastasia.” But boy are they surprised when they board this thing. There is over 100 million dollars of art on it, which they steal all of. By the way, the whole idea behind speed-boat heists is that the boats can race off in any direction and be 100 miles away within minutes, therefore confusing the boat’s occupants on where these pirates came from.
Except when you have a resourceful enough person, they can find out anything. And the person they just stole from was a Russian oligarch. He kills Marty and informs the rest of the crew he’s going to kill all of them AND their families UNLESS they can pull of the impossible. Steal him a 200 million dollar yacht known as the Cortez. That sounds like a dandy plan except for the fact that nobody knows who even owns the Cortez. It’s so steeped in dark crime, it might as well be invisible. But this is the bed our boaties have made for themselves. Now they have to lie in it.
Cut and Run is basically the boat version of The Fast and the Furious. But not The Fast and the Furious as it is now. The Fast and the Furious as it was in the first few movies, when it was grounded in reality. That’s ironic considering that Cut and Run is not set on the ground, but at sea.
The point is, it’s a self-contained story. Fast and Furious has basically become a giant TV series with these new episodes where nothing is really resolved other than a new physics fact, like that a car can now fly in space. To that end – that it was reality-based – I liked Cut and Run.
But Cut and Run has a flaw that it needs to figure out before it gets in front of cameras. Which is that the structure is wonky. Based on the summary of the plot I laid out, what’s the most exciting thing to you about this idea? It’s the Russian oligarch, right? Once he comes in, the story gets a hundred times more interesting. Well, what if I told you that the Russian oligarch doesn’t make his demand on the crew until page 85?
Come on.
That’s a midpoint twist if I’ve ever seen one. It needs to have happened 25 pages earlier.
I think I understand the issue they ran into. They had to set up Jessie. Then they had to set up the whole crew. Then they had to set up the fake racing operation. They had to figure out if they could trust Jessie. And then they had to introduce Jessie to their actual operation (they’re pirates). Then they have to do a long prep for pirating the Anastasia. Then they have to sell all the art they stole from the Anastasia. Then, and only then, could they introduce the oligarch.
These are the challenges you face as screenwriters. You’re constantly looking to fit everything in, and then, at a certain point, you realize there’s too much, and you have to make some sacrifices. Not everything is going to make it. This is healthy though. A screenplay is a battle of the best. If it’s not good enough or if it’s bogging the script down or slowing down the plot, you get rid of it.
My question, looking back on the script, is, “Do we need the racing stuff?” It doesn’t play into the story at all. And it takes up a lot of time. Why not just get straight to the crime so we can move our oligarch’s entrance up to the midpoint?
I suspect that the reason is those boat races are going to feature heavily in the marketing campaign, just like the street races in those early Fast and Furious movies did. Illegal boat racing in Miami? That’s a money shot right there. So I get it. But your big bad guy arriving with 40 pages left in the story? That’s not going to cut or run it.
Another thing that kinda bothered me was that Jessie wasn’t special enough. You always want to give your main character a ‘super power.’ I don’t mean in a superhero sense. But they should be great at something, which is why they’re needed. You can then play with that super power throughout the story. But all Jessie knows how to do is put an engine together. There needed to be more there.
With that said, the script is strong. I definitely felt like I was inside of this world. There is a lot of speedboat and yacht porn here. The level of detail is insane. And it doesn’t feel like the amateur versions of these scripts I read where the level of knowledge of your basic crew member is how many off-color jokes they know. Everybody here has a job. They all seem to know their job well. And that ensured that the suspension of disbelief never broke.
Now if they can just fix that structural problem, this could be a really cool movie.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[x] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Complicate the relationship. There’s a love story between Jessie and Fiona here. You never want these relationships to be too clean. Clean is boring. You have to constantly look for ways to complicate the relationship. One of the ways you can do this is by having one character find out a secret about the other, and then not reveal it. So after Jessie really starts to like Fiona, he gets a call from an old cop friend who he’s asked to look into the crew. The friend tells Jessie that Fiona is talking to the FBI. Keep in mind, Jessie is learning this just days before they go after the Anastasia. This form of dramatic irony allows for much more interesting interactions between Jessie and Fiona now. When Fiona wants to have sex, for example, Jessie has to do so so she doesn’t get suspicious. I don’t know what pretending to have good sex is like with someone who’s planning to send me to prison for the rest of my life, but I’d imagine it’s not an easy feat. But boy is it great drama for everyone else. Complicate the relationship!
